Not every company gets to use their own product every day. But at Tailscale, we’ve been fortunate enough to be able to rely on Tailscale as key networking infrastructure for years now. Using Tailscale at Tailscale helps us in ways you might expect — it’s easier to develop and maintain user empathy when you’re users, after all.
But as our infra team tech lead explains in the new blog post “How Tailscale’s infra team stays small,” it also helps us in ways that might surprise you. Incorporating Tailscale deep into our architecture frees her team up from worrying about certain kinds of tedious work so they can instead focus on more interesting problems.
Check out Kylie’s blog post for details about how Tailscale uses Tailscale. Then check out the rest of this newsletter for updates on the product, our community, and upcoming events.
Product Updates
- Tailscale wrapped: a year of secure remote access
As 2024 comes to a close, let's look at what’s changed — for Tailscale and in the broader landscape of secure networking. This year, the shift towards distributed work, increasingly complex regulatory requirements, and the growing awareness of Zero Trust principles all intersected with one universal truth: most people just want things to work. - Four increasingly sophisticated ways to put a service on your tailnet
Let’s say you’ve got some kind of service you want to connect to through Tailscale. That service may be just about anything — you just want to bring it online so that you can reach it from any authorized device in your tailnet. We’ve compiled four recipes for connection in a classic Galaxy-Brain-meme ladder of just how Tailscale-y you want to get. - Host your own metasearch engine to avoid tracking and profiling
In our latest video tutorial, we’re looking at how to use Tailscale with a kind of private resource that might surprise you: a search engine. SearXNG is a popular open source package that provides search results without tracking or profiling — and for even more privacy, we can configure it to be accessible over Tailscale alone.
📆 Need help using Tailscale? Join our SE Office Hours.
Our Solutions Engineering team hosts an interactive monthly office hour where they answer common technical questions and rotate through demos for new and existing features.
Community Highlights
- Level1Techs video: Tailscale is networking magic
Wendell from Level1Techs interviews Tailscale CEO Avery Pennarun about how Tailscale works and how it fits into the future of networking. The video also includes some fun info about how Tailscale fits into their own production workflows. - Aaron Francis: Setting up Tailscale and Synology for sharing video files
“When I first got the Synology, many people told me to install Tailscale, but I never actually understood what it does. …It wasn't entirely clear to me why I'd want that! But now, I get it. Tailscale makes it easy for Steve to access files on my NAS. That's it!” - Self-Hosting a VPN with Tailscale on a Raspberry Pi
“Do you have a spare Raspberry Pi lying around just waiting for a fun project? If so, let’s give it a new purpose in life by turning it into our very own secure VPN! And, whether you’re a tech enthusiast, a Raspberry Pi hobbyist, or someone just starting out, I hope it inspires confidence to try something new.”
Upcoming Events
- Webinar: Ask a Tailscale Expert
January 15, 2025
Join the Tailscale Solutions Engineer team for our interactive monthly office hours series. Our team will rotate through demos for new and existing features and address common technical concerns, including live audience questions. Register for free to join. - Event: Fosdem
Brussels, Belgium
February 1, 2025
FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels. You don't need to register. Just turn up and join in!
🚀Are you building something cool or exciting using Tailscale? We love hearing about how our customers use Tailscale for their personal setups or at the workplace. We want to share these examples with the broader Tailscale community. If interested, fill out this form, and we will share your experience in an upcoming newsletter.
Parker Higgins
